Author: Nathan Wilcox 2015-06-10 17:37:59
Published on: 2015-06-10T17:37:59+00:00
The author is currently reading about bitcoin development and has just finished reading Mike Hearn's blog post discussing the expected systemic behavior as actual blocks approach the current limit. One detail that Mike uses to argue against the "fee's will save us" line of reasoning is that wallets have no good way to learn fee information. The author then proposes a solution to this problem by putting fee, block size, UTXO, etc. statistics into the locally-verifiable data available to SPV clients, such as block headers. The author suggests a hard fork that places details like per-block total fees, transaction count, fee variance, UTXO delta, etc. in each block header which would allow SPV clients to rely on this data with the same PoW-backed assurances as all other header data. This mechanism seems valuable regardless of the outcome of the blocksize debate since SPV clients should know about fees so long as they are interesting or important. Upgrading the protocol without a hard-fork may be possible and is left as an exercise for the reader.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T22:46:45.638298+00:00